Time Stops
by Gavrilo-Princip
Summary: It happens, completely unexpected. Goodbye, everything else. 2nd in the EitS series.


_Note: This is the second in the Explosions in the Sky series. Maybe collection is a better word since they don't run in any sort of particular order. I don't know. Hope you enjoy it. I'll probably end up making changes to grammar or adding sentences here or there. Hopefully I don't mess up the story. As always, you might want to listen to the song. It's a particular favorite of mine. I hope you like the supply closet incident. I tried to think of the most normal-yet-not way for this to happen. _

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He's not sure how any of this started and that's thematically consistent with his life. He doesn't think either of them expected it when it started. Jim has never asked Angela, but he's certain she was as confused as he was initially.

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He had finished his paperwork, called all of the clients who he had marked down as potentially needing to renew their order, and had even made courtesy calls to his other clients to personally ask them how satisfied they were with their service. This was technically something Kelly was supposed to do and it fact probably either had done it days before or planned on doing it in the near future. She was a lot of things, but a slacker wasn't one of them. No, that was usually his department but today was the exception to that rule.

He could find no particular variation from his morning routine that could account for this nameless energy inside of him. He woke up at his usual time every morning, with enough time to slowly eat two bowls of cereal and an orange in front of the television, catching as he always did Newswatch 16's local morning broadcast. As he brewed coffee, he sat at the kitchen counter and checked his email on his laptop, updated the music section on his Facebook, and checked Amazon for some sort of gift for his mother's upcoming birthday. He checked his watch after pouring a cup of coffee and, seeing that he had plenty of time, stood staring without focus out the back window as he drank his coffee. As he showered and dressed, he thought about the day ahead of him. His thoughts were bland, graying, vague, and fitting. Though the sun was rising in the sky and the weather was getting warmer all the time, he knew it would be another standard day that would be spent on that most essential of tasks: _keeping himself occupied._ He grabbed his bag, his coat, and his keys and prepared himself for the all-too-short drive to work.

He stood from his desk and walked over to reception, slouching against the desk over Pam. They talked for a while and he relayed how bored he was and how he had nothing to do. Pam was equally bored and informed him she was anxious to break this boredom and that it was his responsibility, as the person to introduce the topic, to help her. Jim and Pam lowered their voices to whispers and snuck quick glances at Dwight, trying to come up with some sort of prank (Jim was calling them "social experiments" nowadays). Neither Pam nor Jim could come up with anything simple and easy to pull off, so Pam suggested that they adjourn to their desks to brainstorm ideas for one elaborate prank to be utilized at a later date to salvage the work week.

Jim sat tapping his pen against his yellow legal pad, where had unsurprisingly come up with a lot of ideas, most of which seemed to operate around either the idea of stealing Dwight's car or filling the interior with something one usually didn't find inside a car. He had the background, the idea, but he was mired in the details, unable to come up with anything solid enough to inspire him to act. He needed the tactical and practical logistics and _they just weren't coming_. Frustrated, he crossed out everything he had written.

The sheet he was working on was the final one of the pad and he dropped the whole thing in the trash next to his desk. He searched his draws for another pad, intent on continuing his work and coming up with something hilarious, yet workable. The drawers were empty and he stood and shrugged in response to Pam's questioning look. They both smiled and he headed towards the narrow supply closet.

He found the yellow pad he was looking for and hesitated for a moment in the closet, the door open only a crack. He leaned lightly against a shelf and looked up at the bulb burning brightly. It seems like all he ever does some days is sigh, but he does it again and then inhales the flat smells of paper and printer ink coming from the neatly stacked supplies. His quiet moment of meditation was interrupted when the door opened quickly and Angela stepped into the small space with him.

"Oh...hey, Angela."

"Hello Jim..." it sounded like a question and he felt compelled to provide her with an answer.

"I was just...uh," he was still off balance at the unexpected arrival and just held up the legal pad as an answer. Her eyes went slowly from his face to his hand and back before quickly looking somewhere, anywhere else but at him. She chewed on her lip, just for a second, before clearing her throat.

"Yes, well...I needed to get some more pens."

"Is Kevin still stealing them and acting like he has no idea where they're going?" he laughed, hoping to break the tension. It worked.

"He thinks he's so clever" followed a slight smirk and a roll of her eyes and she stepped deeper into the closet and moved the small stool back to where the pens were on the shelf, right in front of Jim. She was too short to read the shelf.

"Hey, do you want me to...?" he trailed off, pointing over her head at the shelf. She huffed in annoyance and turned back to him.

"I'm quite capable of doing this myself, you know." He simply nodded and watched her get up onto the stool a little over a foot away from him. He wasn't leaving and he didn't know why.

After she found the pens she was looking for, she turned on the stool and lost her footing and stepped awkwardly off the stool and stumbled forward. Jim thought that she might fall and he dropped the legal pad, stooped slightly, and reached out to steady her and she instead closed the gap between them and ended up with her length pressed against his. The pens clattered to the floor out of surprise and her hands grasped his shoulders. The closet was silent except for their breathing.

Jim's left hand clutched her waist and his right cupped her elbow and he could feel how tense she was. Her small hands gripped him tighter and he was very much aware of her breasts pressed tight against his chest. Her green eyes were wide and she stared at him unblinkingly, her lips parted in surprise. An apology died on it's way past his lips and he just stood looking back at her. When she breathed a shaking, hesitant breath, his right arm slipped around her waist and spread across the small of her back. Her hands slipped slowly down over his collar bone, her thumbs just brushed his neck. It felt like they stood there, holding their breath, for a long time. He was about to say something when he saw her eyes dart quickly down to his lips and back up again and she seemed a little scared all of a sudden. Right before she pushed away from him, she brushed a thumb against the hollow of his throat, making his breath catch.

She stooped to pick up her pens, all the while mumbling half-completed apologies or explanations or accusations. He wasn't sure what they were. He couldn't hear her over the sound of his blood pounding in his ears. He waited a further five minutes alone after she excused herself to return back to his desk. At least he remembered to bring the legal pad.

Pam asked him what was up and said he looked a little pale. He mentioned something about feeling a little faint and sat back at his desk. Pam threw worried glances his way as he stared at the blank legal pad. He forgot what he was going to write.

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It had started with just that one clumsy moment of touch. He still got breathless when he thought of the feeling of her pressed against him and she would admit to him later that she did, too.

Of course, that one incident managed to change things so completely that it was hard to just look at it as something banal or mundane. They were hyper-aware of each other after that. He made numerous, clumsy attempts to talk to her. Some of them were well-received and some of them weren't. She was at turns overly polite or inappropriately nasty to him as she tried to come to terms with what she herself was feeling. He didn't hold a grudge against her for this as it hadn't hurt his feelings. It had only served to confuse him more.

After the supply closet, he would stare at her for long periods of time whenever she was in view and he'd get lost in thought, his brow furrowed as he concentrated. Often, this concentration was broken by Dwight asking him why he was staring. A few times, while his nose was buried in papers, he heard Kevin's loud, slow voice asking someone why they were staring at Jim. He never looked, but he knew it was Angela.

He tried to maintain his crush on Pam. He really did. It was much simpler and made much more sense, but he couldn't stop himself. His feelings towards Angela grew more and more and while he was still friendly with Pam and he even still admitted to having some sort of romantic feelings for her, the bright burning of that love was growing dimmer. But Angela...

He saw green eyes and blond hair and smelled the faintness of her perfume every day and he was consumed. She would later share with him the similar experience of her own consumption. He would smile when she told him, embarrassed, that it was the movement of his hands, relaxed and graceful, that caught her attention.

Most people don't accept that explanation on how in the world it all started. Obviously, Pam accepted it least out of everyone. He didn't want to think about that. She'd get used to it.

Everyone was shocked when they would see them holding hands or talking quietly or just smiling wordlessly at each other. The long and comfortable smiles of people who spend a lot of time together.

As he got ready for work, after all of that and the reminiscence passed through his mind, he thought of how she felt against him these days and how it still made him breathless and how everything seemed to move slower, stand still. Stop.


End file.
